BMTH live in Jakarta 2024

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This time around Ravel gets it right and BMTH (Bring Me The Horizon) are headlining the Nexfest festival in Jakarta which also features Babymetal. In this format there is no seating - which makes for a much more intimate experience - although you do have to arrive really early if you want to pick a spot right up close to the stage.  We arrived about six hours before BMTH were scheduled to start their performance and bought plenty of drinks to stay hydrated in the tropical afternoon heat (mind you, some of those were Iceland vodka mix!) This was a gig I had long been looking forward to - especially after the debacle last year. Not everyone likes BMTH of course. For deathcore fans the band sold out. For metal heads the band is not purist enough. And for the wider mainstream audience, the band is too heavy. You can't please everyone of course but there are few bands in the rock world which can match the sheer emotional velocity of BMTH. To bring metal and even aspects of metalcore t...
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Turning Points

Travel changes us, sometimes superficially, sometimes profoundly...It is a classroom without walls. 
 >From On and Off the Beaten Track 1,000 Places to See Before You Die 
A Traveler's Life List by Patricia Schultz 

There was nothing worth watching on the box again last night – you can only gawk at the pretty actresses in Indonesia’s mindnumbing sinetron (soap operas) for so long. A good time then to check out those new DVDs I picked up last week. After some deliberation I decided to give the Motorcycle Diaries a play. 

It turned out to be a good choice. The film reconstructs the incredible journey by motorcycle across South America taken by a young and impressionable Ernesto Guevara and his best friend Alberto Granado. 

Ernesto Guevara, in particular, is profoundly moved by what he sees on their trip. His travels teach him to look upon impoverished Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as one cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy. 

Ernesto Guevara goes on to become one of the most famous revolutionary figures ever of course. Travel really did change him in a profound way. But if travel can change you, then what about living in a foreign country for a long period of time? Would I still be the same person if I hadn’t moved abroad? Would my values be the same? 

This brings us to the idea of alternate pasts. What would I be doing if I hadn’t moved here? Would I have got married? Etc etc. These “what if” scenarios have even generated a type of science fiction in which the basic premise is that some specific historical event never happened, or happened differently. Click here if you’re interested. Fascinating stuff.

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